And it is bringing increased pressure on housing, health and transport
File image of a crowd gathered for an event in Bristol(Image: Paul Gillis)
The population of Bristol has risen to more than half a million for the first time in the city’s history. Bristol City Council has published new figures showing that the population of the city is forecast to go up by ten per cent between 2022 and 2032.
As of the mid point of 2025 – this week – that figure has now exceeded 500,000 for the first time.
The increasing population of the city – which will reach a predicted 526,000 by 2032 – is putting increased pressure on the city’s housing crisis, healthcare, transport and road infrastructure, with issues around housing and healthcare in particular already the subject of a prominent debate. Back in 2022, Bristol’s population was recorded at 478,000 and has been rising ever since, passing the half a million mark at the mid point of 2025.
The updated figures have been revealed from the Office for National Statistics and paint a particular picture for Bristol as a city in the second half of the 2020s and into the 2030s. Bristol will be a place with a bigger than average population of people in their 20s and 30s but, by contrast, a city where fewer adults are having children compared to the national average. The number of children and young people living in the city is expected to decline between now and 2032.
What are the reasons for the population increase?
The population of Bristol is predicted to increase by around 50,000 in the ten years between 2022 and 2032. That 50,000 over ten years is around 5,000 a year, and represents a ten per cent increase in the population of the city as a whole.
Of that 50,000 increase, around 21,465 will be a natural increase with the number of babies being born predicted to be 55,887 in those ten years, while 34,423 people living in Bristol have or will die between 2022 and 2032. That’s a net increase of 21,465, or 4.5 per cent, which is higher than the national England average of just 0.2 per cent.
The number of people moving into Bristol from other parts of the country – most commonly the surrounding areas of the West of England and also from London – is predicted to be 398,695 over the ten years between 2022 and 2032. That’s just under 40,000 every year.
But over the same period of time, a total of 417,069 will leave Bristol to live in other areas, as housing costs rise. Estate agents, property developers and locals have spoken of the phenomenon of people moving out of Bristol to more affordable housing in areas like Newport, Chepstow and South Wales, and growing towns like Weston-super-Mare and into South Gloucestershire developments like Brabazon.
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Overall, the amount of ‘internal’ migration – people moving into and out of Bristol from somewhere else in England – will actually see a net loss of 18,375 people over the ten-year period. The exodus to South Wales particularly is predicted to continue, with a net loss of 4,883 people due to cross-border internal migration, between Bristol and other countries in the UK.
The biggest single factor in the increase in Bristol’s population is international migration. In the ten years between 2022 and 2032, an estimated 98,766 people will move into Bristol from overseas, while 49,009 are predicted to leave Bristol to move to another country. This will contribute an increase of 49,757 to the total population of Bristol, an increase of 10.4 per cent, compared to the England national average of 6.5 per cent.
Much of this international migration into Bristol can be attributed to by the city’s growing universities, who have increasingly spoken about the need to attract more and more foreign students to keep their institutions going, as the level of funding from the UK Government, both directly and in the form of student loans, either decreases or is frozen.
The impact on Bristol
A city having to find new homes, schools, doctors and space for an extra 5,000 people every year – or 50,000 over ten years – faces enormous challenges. But those challenges will arise in some areas more than others.
The demographics of Bristol are remaining fairly constant, despite the increase. Bristol has long been a ‘young’ city – the average age of someone living in Bristol will remain at 33 years of age, which contrasts dramatically with the average age of the rest of the country, which will be 41 and rising.
Schools
Despite the net population change between births and deaths increasing faster than the national average, the birth-rate – the average number of children each woman has in her lifetime – is falling more quickly in Bristol than in the rest of the country, despite the city having a much younger average age.
That means that, between 2022 and 2032, the percentage of Bristol’s population that is of primary school age children will fall from eight per cent to six per cent in the next few years, and secondary school age children falling from seven per cent to six per cent.
A protest outside Hotwells Primary School on Monday, June 23, 2025, against its closure and takeover by Cathedral Primary School(Image: National Secular Society)
This means the pressures from population increases are not predicted to affect schools as much as in other parts of the country, or in previous rapid population increases. A ‘bulge’ of school-age children went through Bristol in the 2000s and early 2010s, which sparked a severe shortage of school places, particularly secondary school places in many areas of the city.
There are currently two secondary schools under construction – at Knowle West and in St Philips – which have been delayed for so long that students face the prospect of having most of their secondary education in temporary classrooms while they wait for the schools to be finished.
The decline in primary school children numbers has been cited as a reason for the proposed closure of Hotwells primary school, and its merger with Cathedral Primary School a mile away.
Healthcare and housing
One of the biggest and most controversial challenges facing Bristol will be how the NHS, and in particular primary care, copes with the increase in population. An expanded new Southmead Hospital opened in 2014, and the capacity of the NHS has increased more recently with the opening of a £50 million surgery centre based on the Southmead campus.
But the biggest challenge for strategic health planners is that much of the population increase in Bristol is concentrated in specific regeneration areas – particularly when light-industry zones and brownfield land is redeveloped into high-density residential developments.
This means, over the course of just a year or two, thousands of people can move into an area where previously no one or only very few people lived.
This is already an issue in four areas in the city – Bedminster, the area around St Philips which is now called ‘Temple Quarter’, the ‘Frome Gateway’ regeneration area in St Judes and the ‘Central Fishponds’ area. Each of these four areas will see anywhere between 2,000 and 15,000 new residents in the next few years – all of whom will need to register with a GP.
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In Bedminster and Fishponds, for example, NHS bosses say local GP surgeries are already over-capacity, and while they could simply employ more doctors to match the increase in population, the real issue is the physical space to put them in.
Patients in Ashton and Bedminster are already been sent to appointments with their local GP in the city centre, because the biggest GP practice group does not have the physical space to house them in South Bristol.
NHS bosses in Bristol have been at loggerheads with city council planners for more than a year now over who should pay the millions of pounds required to create and run those new GP surgeries. The NHS is asking for millions of pounds in Community Infrastructure Levy – money paid by housing developers to the local council for public infrastructure – but so far the council has been declining those appeals.
Councillors are expected to meet later this year to thrash out a new City Hall policy on this issue.
Transport
The extra 50,000 people who will live in Bristol in 2032 compared to in 2022 will put extra strain on both public transport and the road network. Despite a succession of measures to discourage people from driving private cars, particular in the city centre, with bus gates, the Clean Air Zone and now ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’, the number of cars on Bristol’s roads is predicted to increase in the coming years.
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Part of that is down to the increase in the population, but mainly because surrounding areas around the city are experiencing large population increases too. Some 6,000 new homes are being built at the old Filton Airfield site just over Bristol’s northern border with South Gloucestershire, and there are large-scale housing developments around Bristol’s northern and eastern fringes too.
Last month, North Somerset Council voted for a method of meeting its own Government housing targets which involved a large share of their new houses being built on their side of the border with South Bristol, particular with a new town or suburb on the site of the Woodspring golf course on the edge of Bristol.
These out-of-Bristol developments will increase traffic on the roads into the city, and will also increase demand for public transport.
The West of England metro mayor Helen Godwin welcomed some £752 million of Government money to improve buses and trains in the Greater Bristol area, but the amount was much lower than the billions other metropolitan areas like Sheffield, Nottingham, Newcastle and Leeds received to expand existing mass transit schemes they have, like trams, light rail and underground systems.
As Bristol’s population exceeds over half a million, there will be increased calls for those hundreds of millions from central Government to become billions to create a mass transit system for Bristol too.